Paul ended the last portion of his letter with a doxology (a brief exclamation of praise to God) and an amen. It’s as though he’s pausing for breath for the first time since he began. Chapters 1-3 could almost be considered as one long, rambling introduction–and it’s humbling that Paul’s intro contains more theological meat than many evangelical books and sermons today.
Paul begins this new segment with a “therefore,” drawing our attention momentarily to the previous pages. “I, therefore, the prisoner of God, beseech you to walk worthy of the calling with which you were called.” If all this is true; if everything I’ve been praying about you is right, then please, please, walk and live as though it’s true.
What Paul is getting at is that God doesn’t just save people (though we rejoice at that) or a church (though His church will be glorious). He redeems the totality of our lives and culture, and expects us to do everything we do as if we were doing it to God (Paul will get to this in 6:6), to His glory (1 Corinthians 10:31), even to the point of bringing our thoughts and reasoning under Christ’s authority (2 Corinthians 10:5).
For this reason I’ve put the final section of Ephesians under the heading God saves cultures. Paul is trying to get us to see how God’s grace is infectious; it redeems and renews us as whole persons, not merely as souls waiting to die and go to heaven. In these remaining chapters, Paul is going to explain how grace applies to church life (4:1-4:16), personal life (4:17-5:21), family life, (5:22-6:4), and work life (6:5-6:9).
When we talk about “the church,” or “church life,” it’s important to have some idea of what we mean. To many folks’ minds, the church is an institution–a building, an organization, a place you go on certain days. While these ideas aren’t exactly false, Paul sees the church as so much more. Again, this blog post isn’t the place to dive into a full-length discussion of ecclesiology, but Paul offered some images of what the church is in the last section.
One metaphor Paul used, as we saw, was that of a temple. The church is like a glorious temple made up of what Peter calls “living stones.” And yet the church is also the priesthood serving in the temple. St. John even uses the term “kingdom of priests” in Revelation 1:6 (NIV), which fits with Jesus’ frequent discussion of the “kingdom of heaven.” In Ephesians 3:15 Paul also describes the church as a living person: “…to create in Himself one new man out of the two….” My point here is just that even though much of what Paul is going to say will involve the local, institutional church, we need to keep in mind that, biblically speaking, the church is so much more than local.
In Ephesians Paul lays particular stress on love and unity. He beseeches us to bear with one another in love, “endeavoring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called in one hope of your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all” (4:3-6). Again, Paul is so theologically meaty that whole seminary courses could be taught on this chapter. But if we’re looking for just the basics, we can sum up the unity that Paul preaches as a unity of love and a unity of sound doctrine.
Paul sees it as simple: There’s one God, one faith, and one baptism; therefore, the church should strive to be one, rather than fractured and disjointed. You can’t build a temple if the stones will only stick together in small groups and cliques. They all need to be joined together, and the mortar Paul proposes to use is love.
I have a feeling Paul would lose patience with many of us conservative evangelicals, who will split a church because the pastor didn’t come out strongly enough against supralapsarianism. But true Christian unity isn’t a union in which anything goes, or in which doctrine doesn’t matter. Unity must be a truthful unity, founded on the core beliefs of the saints and apostles, with Jesus Himself as the chief cornerstone. Consider how verses 14-16 bring in the importance of sound doctrine without de-emphasizing the importance of love. Unity, for Paul, means neither splitting churches over minor issues nor drifting aimlessly in the postmodern tide pool.
Paul calls the church to walk this fine balance of love and truth. I’m reminded of a quote from C. S. Lewis: “The world of dogmatic Christianity is a place in which thousands of people of quite different types keep on saying the same thing, and the world of ‘broad-mindedness’ and watered-down ‘religion’ is a world where a small number of people (all of the same type) say totally different things and change their minds every few minutes. We shall never get re-union from them” (God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics [Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1972], p. 60).
When Paul moves on to speak about personal life (4:17-5:21), he reminds the formerly pagan Ephesians to walk in the light now that they’ve been set free from their former darkness. We don’t become Christians through behavior changes or do-gooding; we’re not saved by works. Yet new life in Christ calls for a new way of life, a way that’s honoring to the one who called us. Paul exhorts his readers to renounce a life of sexual promiscuity, drunken excesses, dishonesty, and uncontrolled anger, taking up instead the “new man”–a kind man who speaks words that encourage and build up those around him.
Paul then touches on family life (5:22-6:4). He addresses wives (5:22-24), calling on them to submit to the leadership of their husbands just as the church submits to Christ. He addresses husbands, reminding them that their leadership role doesn’t make them innately superior to their wives; rather, it means they should love and cherish their wives like Christ loves His church (5:25-33). He speaks to children (6:1-4), reminding them of Moses’ law: Honor your father and your mother. This law actually contains a promise for future well-being, Paul notes. At the same time, Paul reminds fathers not to be tyrannical with their children, but care for them in the “discipline and instruction of the Lord.”
The final aspect of this section (and really the last words before Paul’s conclusion) deals with what we’d call work life (6:5-6:9). Yet Paul isn’t actually speaking to managers and employees; he’s speaking to masters and slaves. Obviously this isn’t the place for a full-blown discussion of slavery–and even the term slavery is too ambiguous. Are we talking about Hebrew slavery, allowed and regulated by the law of Moses? Are we talking about Greek slavery, which often involved immense education? Roman slavery? Nineteenth-century racist slavery? The current form of slavery we call corrections or the penal system?
We can learn from Paul’s other letters that slavery isn’t ideal, and if his readers had the opportunity to gain their freedom, it was a good thing. Yet Paul never endorses a violent overthrow of the current Greco-Roman system, encouraging his readers instead to work within their current circumstances. And what Paul says here can be applied to contemporary job life as well; we all have “masters,” though they tend to be corporate monoliths instead of Greek landowners. Paul is telling us to do our jobs as if we were doing them to Christ, not with mere “eyeservice, as men-pleasers.” Similarly, those in authority should reject “threatening,” remembering that they too have a Boss, and He rules heaven and earth. Imagine how a simple application of these verses could reshape our culture. Imagine that Christians were known at work, not as holier-than-thou coworkers with evangelistic one-liners, but as hard-working, selfless people with a secret motivation that make those around them curious to know more.
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